


A Sea of Foliage Girds our Garden Round

by Chestnut_filly



Series: Actual Fic [16]
Category: Unfit to Print - K. J. Charles
Genre: Black Character(s), Canon Queer Character of Color, Dialogue Heavy, Fluff, Humor, Indian Character, M/M, Nude Photos, Post-Canon, Surprising Amounts of Geology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 00:22:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29501262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly
Summary: Negotiations concerning love tokens before a voyage; or, Gil finds a sufficiently pretty rock and sufficiently nice curtains for Vikram's discerning tastes.Not paisley. Buying Scottish paisley is colonialist.
Relationships: Gil Lawless/Vikram Pandey
Series: Actual Fic [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/935439
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Black Is Beautiful 2021





	A Sea of Foliage Girds our Garden Round

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whalebone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whalebone/gifts).



> For Whalebone! The original prompts for this fandom were: "Gil's collection of photographs gives them some inspiration; Lazy mornings in bed; A missing scene from their schooldays; A holiday! To the Lake District? To somewhere in Europe? Going on an adventure together; Gil has a run-in with one of the men he met while living rough. Hurt/comfort! … I love the contrast between these two characters, with Gil's unapologetic, more brazen nature coming up against the more uptight Vikram. I'd love to see them exploring and developing their relationship more."
> 
> I hope this satisfies! I also tried to incorporate some of your general likes.
> 
> Before you start reading, I also think it would be good to introduce you all to a) [chert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chert#/media/File:ChertUSGOV.jpg), and b) [William "I Betray My Socialist Principles for Arsenic Manufacturers" Morris' worst print](https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1110613/fruit-wallpaper-morris-william/). There are more reference notes at the end.

In the end, it had come down to the curtains’ bilious, dubiously-formed fruits. 

_Balls,_ thought Gil with some glee, _and little fruit cunnies and arses on the vine,_ in olive drab discord with the little boulder’s pea-soup viridescence even in black and white. 

“These with the lovely glistening crevices are supposedly pomegranates, not that I’ve seen any to judge, and I’m sure you can tell the peaches by their cheeks, and then frankly I haven’t the foggiest what those furry orbs are, but you’ve got to agree they go well with the rock.” 

Gil could tell that Vikram agreed to nothing of the sort, having halfway frozen in packing his new, brass-fitted steamer trunk.

“Freddy is a man of taste. After the curtains, he showed me the rock and I just knew it was your thing. Straight from Norfolk, you know; it’s traveled, it’s seen the world. A rock with experience, but a looker too.” 

“Flint, you said.” Vikram sounded uncharacteristically faint. 

“It’s not just flint, though. In fact, the thing’s called _chert._ It’s flint with airs.”

Gil fizzed with amusement right up to his ears. The nerves, unfortunately, stayed down right about his gut, but he had a real kicker to keep them down. 

“He said,” Gil continued, feeling as though he were shaking a champagne bottle, voice growing more strangled with every word, “That it comes from _siliceous ooze._ ”

He watched Vikram absorb this, his straight, dark brows reaching towards his hairline. 

“ _Ooze?_ ” he repeated in a tone of absolute outrage. The cork popped, and Gil howled with laughter, doubling over in his chair beside the bed. 

“Do you want to show it _your_ salacious ooze, Vik?” he forced out, and then doubled over again, guffawing until his air ran out and left him _ack-ack-acking_ breathlessly into his knees. 

“This is the most ungodly ugly photograph I have ever seen,” Vikram said, though Gil was in no position to respond. “Where did you even find these, these awful drapes? Where did you come by a great chunk of stone like this in London? Did you pay for this? Gil? Gil, are you listening to me?” 

Ribs aching, Gil managed to draw in a gasp of air. “Worth it at the price for your face,” he panted, fighting down resurgent giggles. “It’s all Freddy’s singular domestic stylings.” He gasped again. “You mean you’re not putty in my hands? No visions of salacious ooze?” 

“ _Stop_ saying ‘ooze.’” Vikram’s eyebrows were doing their considerable best to convey his displeasure, but Gil could see the smile pulling at the edges of his lovely mouth. He grinned back at him in helpless sympathy. “What Freddy are you talking about? Surely not your Mr. Harmer?” 

“The same,” Gil said. “He came in for that Rossetti reprint, _Dante and His Lot_ , and we got to talking about his Arts and Crafts wallpapers and his lovely wife Mary and their creative uses of his field camera -- he has bigger stones than the flint!” 

Customers in general, Gil had found since setting up in his shingle on Paternoster Row, were much keener to stay and chat when they weren’t afraid of the peelers pouncing on them any minute. Furthermore, the types of Bohemian customers who thought it appropriately outrageous to visit a bookseller who happened to be a man of color with trade roots in Holywell Street tended to be firstly, far more interested in wallpaper than Gil would have expected of the scandalous avant-garde, secondly, geologists more frequently than he ever would have guessed, and thirdly, _more_ free with their peccadilloes than some Holywell chaps he’d known. The privileges of wealthy eccentricity, he supposed. 

He couldn’t complain. A reputation for Bohemianism and a stock of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, Darwin, the good Mrs. Seacole, and _Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine_ satisfied his appetite for contrarianism, provided an unexpected number of opportunities for applying his previous professional expertise, and kept him fat enough in pocket to buy a second-class P&O steamer berth for India. Frederic Harmer happened to be avant-garde, a geologist, and possessed of an array of particular likings -- and well-off to boot -- and a regular since the early days. He also happened to own an R & J Beck camera like a circus concertina that, when he was not photographing rock formations in Norfolk, his Mary put to titillating personal use. 

Vikram looked half-impressed, half-scandalized, which ratio Gil had been steadily chipping away at for two years now. 

“Anyway,” Gil continued, “He came here after his photographic chemist’s and showed me the pictures his wife was taking of their house as they redecorate -- there’s money in rocks, I guess -- and when I saw the curtains I knew immediately that I’d found your parting gift.” 

“Tremendously grateful, I’m sure,” Vikram intoned, but he was out-and-out smiling now. “It is a pretty rock, or would be. Those awful things are actually hanging in their house?” 

“They’re worse than you think,” Gil said. “They’re the ugliest shade of green on top of the ugliest shade of blue you’ve ever seen. And they look even dirtier in person.” 

Vikram shook his head. A lover of handsome quality, form _in_ function spoke best to his eminent practicality. Gil almost wished he could have those curtains in the shop so he could see Vikram disapprove at them every day. Almost.

Vikram took a breath, and Gil recognized the familiar sight of him squaring up to be sincere and heartfelt. The nerves ratcheted up a notch. 

“Gil,” Vikram said, “Thank you. I know a month’s separation will be difficult, and I very much appreciate that you are sending me off with a gift that, until we rendezvous in Calcutta, will remind me of your wit and-”

“Oh, Jesus, Vik, stop,” said Gil, the urge to keep Vikram from straining something while trying to compliment his joke winning out over his nerves. “There’s more to it. I didn’t just-- There’s-- open the back, you’ll see, there’s a catch in the frame.” 

He looked away, towards the window, and focused on the slubs in the curtains -- the unfinished silk tabby purchased from that handloom-weaver’s collective in Shad Thames which Vikram had represented in a case last year. He swallowed. He heard Vikram fumbling with the catch and then the soft click of the backing coming off. 

Mary Harmer had assured him that she had set up the camera perfectly well for his “aesthetical project” and that she was certain it would turn out to be “quite too utterly utter,” which avowal Gil received with about the same confidence he would have a profession of love from a Hyde Park working boy.

In the end, Sunil helped him arrange the lighting and the composition at home, and Gil thought, maybe, that he looked well enough in his altogether in front of the bookshelves downstairs. Maybe Vikram might enjoy looking at his shoulders or something in the evenings after retiring to whatever palatial bedroom his aristocratic Lucknow relatives bestowed upon him for his visit. Maybe he’d appreciate how the lighting emphasized Gil’s bloody cheekbones in his private first-class carriage on the mail route through Marseilles. Maybe--

“Dear heaven, Gil.” 

Or maybe he would put the whole thing down as a bad joke like the damn rock, or decide Gil was no better than he ought to be, or that it was tawdry, or--

Vikram had crossed the room before Gil had even registered him moving, the frame’s false back swinging open in his hand to reveal Gil in silver monochrome pressed naked against the section of his own bookshelves containing the mildly seditious Indian literature in English, legs spread, head tilted back and to the side, cloud of hair blending into the leather bindings, hand coyly covering his cock so only the head peeped out beside his wrist. 

“I just thought you might like-” he began, but Vikram kissed him before he could finish. The knots in Gil’s stomach came undone in an instant, and he reached up to pull Vikram in by the shoulders.

“I do like it,” Vikram mumbled against his mouth, pressing Gil towards him, the frame still in his hand digging a little into Gil’s shoulderblades. “I like it; I can’t believe you did this in the _shop_.”

Gil laughed. “Right on top of poor Derozio, just for you,” he said. “I can’t believe you really like it.” 

Vikram stopped trying to kiss him, which Gil disapproved of heartily, but Vikram disapproved of Gil trying to kiss him quiet even more heartily, so he allowed it. He tilted his head back to get a better look at Vikram’s face, slipping his hands down to rest at his waist. 

“I never liked this sort of thing when it was just -- poor Errol and who knows who else, just anyone, and you didn’t know if they wanted to be there,” Vikram said. His eyebrows were being extremely sincere, while his dark eyes glittered to form that uniquely Vikramish look of unaffected honesty and highly effected lust. 

“But this is just you,” he continued. “And I know you, and you would hardly be exploiting yourself, and you’ve got your _hand_ -” He buried his face in Gil’s shoulder, despite that he had to stoop to do so. “I like it so much, and I like that… it’s just for me, that I’m the only one to see this.”

“Well, you and Sunil,” said Gil, in the interests of honesty. “He really helped make sure my skin would show up right.”

“Bother Sunil,” muttered Vikram. Gil laughed, and brought a hand up to stroke Vikram’s hair.

“But I made it for you,” he said. “I had this camera on loan, and, well, I am going to miss you, even if we are going to be going on adventures once you’re done with your grand family tour --don’t you say ‘bother Sunil’ when he’s taking care of the shop so I can go gallivanting off after you for three months-- and I thought you might find it-- Good.” 

“It is good,” said Vikram, pulling Gil close again, mostly, Gil discovered, so he could grind his hips and --ah, yes, that was his cock-- against Gil’s belly. “You can see where I bit you, God in heaven.”

Gil started a little, despite other pressing demands on his attention. “Can you really?” 

“You hadn’t noticed?” Vikram asked, from the approximate level of his sternum as he took measured offense at each individual button of Gil’s shirt. He parted the wings of the garment and bit, gently, over the crest of his hipbone. “Here.” 

“Hnh,” Gil said, then collected himself with an effort. “Show me the picture?” 

Vikram handed him up the frame, and indeed, there it was. Just a little smudge in the photo, darker yet than the skin of his stomach, from where Vikram had bit him uncharacteristically hard at play one night. He’d written it off as a trick of the plate. 

“So it’s like I’m in the photo too,” Vikram said, now entirely on his knees and working the fastenings of Gil’s trousers, regaining his full attention instantly. “That bite will be there forever, God, Gil--” 

And he took Gil in his mouth, and Gil clean forgot about the picture for the rest of the hour. 

Afterwards, they had to repack Vikram’s trunk a little to make sure the photo, hidden once again behind the chert in its glory, was well-cushioned. Gil, lying dazed with success on the bed, was relatively little help. 

“I wish we could go at the same time,” he said. “No, don’t say it, I know why. You’ve got to meet your family first and there’s no way to cram a dodgy bookseller into this trunk in the flesh.”

Vikram gave him one of his slow smiles. “You’ll only be two weeks behind me on the steamer, and I will be coming down from Lucknow to meet you at the port as soon as you disembark,” he said. “And, after all, you did find a way to cram yourself into my trunk, in a manner of speaking.” 

“My ingenuity knows no bounds,” Gil informed him. “I only wish I could have kept the camera longer, so I could have kept you in my trunk too.” 

Vikram ducked his head, clearly embarrassed. “I don’t know if I would like that,” he said. “But perhaps, if you could convince Mr. Harmer to lend you the camera again on some excuse, I could be the photographer?” 

Gil smiled. He reached out to pull Vikram back onto the mattress, magnanimously ignoring Vikram stumbling over the trunk on his way. “I would like that,” he said. “And I’m sure Mr. Harmer would be perfectly up for another trade.” 

Vikram settled onto his elbows beside him, and cocked his head. “What did you pay him, in the end?”

“Oh, not money,” Gil replied. “I just promised I’d put both his books in the front window for the week. Rough, but worth it at the price, and I thought I'd make a little sciences display with some of Africanus Horton's books.” 

“How is it rough?” Vikram asked. 

“Well, the title of the first one is,” Gil began, and took a portentously deep breath, “ _Supplement to the Monograph of the Crag Mollusca, with Descriptions of Shells from the Upper Tertiaries of the East of England_.” 

He paused. Vikram looked mildly consternated. 

“Geologists,” he said, after a moment. 

“Geologists,” Gil agreed. “But hey, Vik, at least you can really appreciate those molluscas now.” 

“Can I?” 

“Well, yeah,” said Gil, grinning and running his hand down Vikram’s ribs. “You’ll never get held at a border again. If any jumped-up imperial customs peeler goes through your trunk, you can just show him your pretty rock in front of those bloody curtains and explain that these mollusca things die and, after a thousand million years, they make for _great_ siliceous ooze.” 

And, before Vikram could do more than sputter in outrage, Gil kissed him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Does it even count as a fic of mine without ~~excessive~~ contextual notes? 
> 
> 1\. The title is from [a poem](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/sea-foliage-girds-our-garden-round) by [Toru Dutt](http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/toru-dutt), one of the first Indian writers to publish in English. She was [far from the only Indian woman to do so during this period](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287424264_Anglophone_Indian_women_writers_1870-1920). All due respect to Dutt, but it just _sounds_ dirty.  
> 2\. William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Aesthetic movement were all part of the artistic avant-garde in Victorian Britain around the 1870s. They were mostly upper-class and white and [expressed their political views through design and art](https://legionofhonor.famsf.org/legion/exhibitions/cult-beauty-victorian-avant-garde-1860-1900). They were indeed very into wallpaper. D.G. Rossetti (author of "Dante and His Lot," aka _Dante And His Circle_ ), evolution, and the scurrilous literary rag _Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine_ would all have been common topics of conversation in this milieu.  
> 3\. Mrs. Seacole refers to Jamaican-Scottish nurse [Mary Seacole](https://www.maryseacoletrust.org.uk/learn-about-mary/), who travelled widely as a nurse and, through her actions in Crimea, became as famous in Britain as Florence Nightingale. Her memoir, which Gil notes as a stalwart seller, was one of the first autobiographies written by a Black woman to be published in Britain, and can be [read for free online!](https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/seacole/adventures/adventures.html)  
> 4\. Freddy Harmer, aka [Frederic William Harmer FGS, FRMetS](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-07704-8), was a real English geologist of the period who specialized in Norfolk. He was _almost certainly_ not in the slightest bit avant-garde, and his wife Mary was similarly almost certainly not into taking dirty photos with her husband's field camera. They were hijacked for my plot device based purely on how funny I thought it would be. F.W. Harmer did create the first known [drift geology map](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-07704-8_3), though, which is cool. It was published in that mollusk book.  
> 5\. [Siliceous ooze](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/ooze) was the phrase that made me decide that Vikram's pretty rock _had_ to be chert.  
> 6\. [Paternoster Row](https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010460369) is where all the bookshops in London that _weren't_ dirty were.  
> 7\. [This](https://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/69282-english-hybrid-style-field-camera-1875) is what Harmer's field camera probably looked like.  
> 8\. By the 1870s, someone of means could get from London to India in about three weeks by taking the mail route to Marseilles, and thence by ship to the subcontinent. Those with less could get there by [P&O steamer](https://www.poheritage.com/our-history/timeline) in about a month.  
> 9\. ["Derozio"](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369801X.2011.628119?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=riij20) is Henry Vivian Louis Derozio, an Indian-Portuguese-English radical, poet, and educator who nurtured the Young Bengal movement.  
> 10\. "Quite too utterly utter" is a slightly anachronistic reference to [a satire](https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O81539/iquite-too-utterly-utteri-songsheet-cover-concanen-alfred/) mocking Made-Up Mrs. Harmer's Aesthetical sensibilities.  
> 11\. James Africanus Horton, of Sierra Leone, was the first African to graduate as a Doctor of Medicine from Edinburgh University. He was a prolific author and early pan-Africanist who campaigned for African-led education in the sciences and self-government. I bet _The Political Economy of British West Africa: with the Requirements of Several Colonies and Settlements_ (1865) and _West African Countries and Peoples_ (1868) will sell much better than mollusks. 
> 
> You can learn more about Black London in the 19th century from the Equiano Centre's interactive map [here](https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1DI6vZrs9DfD9NR8BttYwABHIvts&ll=51.511486000000005%2C-0.11599699999999213&z=12), and about Black authors in Britain [here](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcr9gm).


End file.
